As anyone who has ever booked a flight knows, this seemingly simple question is anything but. When are you traveling? What time? Are you willing to have a stop over? Do you need a nonstop? What's your closest airport? Can you travel to a nearby one? How many bags are you taking? And on and on.

Despite working & studying the airports/airspace system for my entire adult life, airline ticket pricing still makes no sense whatsoever.

"It's something that I've always taken for granted, that airfare will never really make sense," Freya Dowson, traveling photographer and blogger, told Mashable. "You just sort of accept it. Today, I'm booking a ticket to go to Senegal and I was looking at Skyscanner. It was £700 and a 24-hour trip. Then I checked on Momondo and it was £450 and eight hours."

"Airlines seem to be pulling their prices out of thin air,"Christopher Elliott, travel columnist and author of How To Be The World's Smartest Traveler, told Mashable. "If you look up the prices of a round trip versus a one-way, the round-trip may be much cheaper. It doesn't make any sense to you or me, but to the airlines it makes perfect sense."

Because airplane prices make no sense, my 10 hour flight from Amsterdam to Orlando costs LESS than my 5 hour flight from Orlando to LA.

The study focused on three "airfare myths": 1. A multi-leg ticket should cost more than a single-leg (longer flights cost more money); 2. The price of a single stop flight should be lower than buying the individual legs separately (bundling saves money); 3. A short layover should cost less than a multi-day layover (customer convenience drives price).

Here's a deeper look at those and other more myths and assumptions about airfare.

Myth #1: The longer the flight, the higher the price

Not so for 24.5% of the airfares the team examined

The “hub-and-spoke” model of air travel makes certain routes — even though they may be a shorter distance — much more expensive than others.

Hidden-city ticketing — the "travel hack" wherein a customer buys a ticket from point A to point C with a layover at point B, but gets off the plane at point B — can save passengers money on nearly a quarter of all flights. But (and this is a big but) airlines frown on the practice, and can cancel any future tickets and take away rewards points or status if they find out a customer is using the tactic.

"It doesn't make any sense to pay more if you get off the aircraft sooner," Elliott said. "But in the world of airline logic, it makes perfect sense. Because point A to point B may have a much higher demand than point A to point C, allowing them to charge higher prices."

Further complicating the matter, each airport charges a different amount to use its facilities — something that can drastically change the price of flights, even when distance is about the same.

Myth #2: Bundling saves money

In 37% of fares, it was cheaper to book legs separately than buying them together

So sometimes a roundtrip ticket can be cheaper than a one-way — and sometimes buying each leg as a one-way can be cheaper than a roundtrip.

There is also the matter of bundling "extras," from baggage fees to food to in-flight entertainment.

"Certain airlines may be cheap, but when you stack on baggage fees, that deal suddenly isn't as great," Evita Robinson, creator of Nomadness Travel Tribe, told Mashable.

On top of baggage fees, there could also be fees for more legroom, for printing a boarding pass, for seat selection, to change an itinerary, for Wi-Fi and meals.

"But don't lose hope," Robinson said. "There are times when this can work to your advantage, you just have to be privy to fees."

Myth #3: Customer convenience drives price

Customer demand drives price.

In 7.5% of the fares studied, it was actually more expensive to have a multi-day layover than a short couple of hours, proving that quickest travel time does not always equate most expensive.

Travel has different values to different people, and that's something airlines know well.

Airfare, and many other types of travel ticketing, is based off an economic principal called dynamic pricing. This is basically charging different prices to different people for the same — or similar — service. It's the principle at play when it's raining at 2 a.m. and all the cabs are taken and Uber decides it's time for surge pricing: charging a higher rate when someone will have no choice but to pay it.

Airlines use this principle to apply price hikes for last-minute and business travelers.

Last-minute travelers often have no choice but to suck up and pay high airfare. If you need to be somewhere with little notice — say because of a family emergency — price is not a deterrent. And business travelers will pay higher prices for two reasons: They need to get to a meeting by a certain time in a certain city — and will pay anything for it, or they simply don't care about price — they'll charge it to the company credit card.

Airlines use sophisticated algorithms, called Yield Management Systems, to figure out the highest possible prices they can charge to business and last-minute travelers.

"Airlines use Yield Management Systems to figure out how much you're willing to pay for a flight, and that's how they price their tickets," said Elliott. "Price is not based on distance or logic or anything that you or I would think makes sense."

Myth #4: Airlines want to fill each flight

Airlines really just want to maximize profit.

The cost of providing a flight is fixed, long before take-off. The airline already has the plane and employees. They know exactly how much they are going to spend on fuel. And it's about the same cost whether the plane is basically empty or at maximum capacity. So an airline's ability to maximize profit depends on how much money they can make from passengers in ticket sales.

If setting a higher price sells fewer seats but increases profit, the airlines will do it.

Myth #5: You can't combat airline pricing

False.

“It’s not only that there’s a price for a service," said Meichanetzoglou. "It’s much more complicated than that. My advice is just to be aware that this happens.”

"It's impossible to predict when is the best time to book," Dowson said. "It's different for each airline and it depends on their individual sales, so it's best to just keep an eye on it for a few weeks or a couple of months before you want to book."

She added: "Or research the off-season for some countries and maybe consider traveling when most tourists would look to avoid a place — sometimes it's better to brave a rainy season or a hot summer for the sake of an affordable experience."

"There are ways of getting around the system," Elliott said. "Airlines are doing something that looks unethical, and it may be tempting to do the same thing in return. But as my mother always says, two wrongs don't make a right," he said. "A better way to combat this is allowing market sources to regulate prices. Customers can reject pricing that is not fair and refuse to pay the higher fares."

"If we just don't fall for their tricks, eventually this will end," he said.

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